APPETIZERS

When tackling something complex, such as a foreign language or Vim commands, digesting small bits of knowledge might be more effective than consuming a super-sized meal of information. This month’s Perl column gives you a method of serving up knowledge snippets by email.

No matter how good your command of English might be, there is always room for improvement. Or do you already know what “cynosure” or “exonym” means? Because I subscribe to “A.Word.A .Day” (AWAD), I receive a new word every day by email. Figure 1 shows how the service describes the daily word in simpler terms and provides examples of the word in action. A Tip a Day Because this approach is so effective, I thought of extending it to other fields. If there are daily tips for the Vim editor, why not have them for Perl? Or for the Java pitfall of the day? All it would take would be a script that stores the tips, and a cronjob that sends the tips to a list of subscribers every morning.

Hobby YouTuber Mike Schilli is interested in whether his videos go viral. What better way to check skyrocketing viewer numbers than letting a Perl script analyze the daily trends and watch for unexpected upswings?

On the Amazon Kindle eBook reader, you can save personal clippings, or “highlights,” in a file; later, you can connect the Kindle to a USB port on a Linux machine and grab the data with a Perl script that stores it in a database.

Barcodes efficiently speed us through supermarket checkout lines, but the technology is also useful for totally different applications. An inexpensive barcode scanner can help you organize your private library, CD, or DVD collection.